THOROLD, Ontario — An agreement with shortline holding company GIO Rail has returned rail service to an industrial park in Thorold, near Niagara Falls, for the first time in more than two decades.
GIO Rail’s switching agreement with HOPA Ports — the Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority — and Bioveld Canada, owner of the Thorold Multimodal Hub, will allow GIO to use track owned by Canadian national to provide first- and last-mile delivery and transload services. The multimodal hub is a 200-acre industrial complex in the Regional Municipality of Niagara with more than 500,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor storage space.
“With GIO Rail on board, we can operationalize rail lines that have not been used in more than two decades,” Justus Veldman, managing partner of Bioveld Canada, said in a press release.
The agreement gives rail uses access to the site’s transload, warehousing, and railcar storage capacity. Still to come is a marine-rail connection, a reactivated gantry crane, and a rail scale. The parties see the site as attractive for forest products, bulk liquid, plastics, and metals.
“Room to grow and complete multimodal connections are value we are providing to users of the Thorold Multimodal Hub,” said Jeremy Dunn, HOPA’s commercial vice president.
GIO Rail operates 34 miles of track in the Niagara region, 36 miles between Mississauga and Orange, and purchased the Trillium Railway in 2018.
OBRY last run Orangeville to Streetsville was in December 2021. Entire line abandoned.
……36 miles between Mississauga and Orangeville…….